


give me a place to stand

by Eisoj5



Category: Ysabel - Guy Gavriel Kay
Genre: Allusions to Other Works, Gen, Post-Canon, Winter Solstice, Yuletide 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 08:09:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13049991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eisoj5/pseuds/Eisoj5
Summary: "Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don't understand but in the dream it feels as if it has some enormous meaning-either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again."-C.S. Lewis,The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe





	give me a place to stand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coralysendria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coralysendria/gifts).



> This takes place in 2005. 
> 
> For coralysendria. Happy holidays!

Melanie returns to Montreal three inches taller, and nothing— _nothing—_ fits.

“No joking about the six-million-dollar man,” she’d insisted, though only Edward obeyed.

Her clothes, obviously. Her pants are _actually_ capri-length now, which is great for summer—everyone hopes it won’t be as bad as two years ago, and there’s a lot of relieved muttering when the temperature drops in the days after—but less than professional when fall arrives. Skirts are impractical for her work, though she’d found herself gravitating towards certain kinds of dresses in consignment stores in France, tunics and long flowing things, after Dave had handed her a wad of euros and tells her in no uncertain terms that _Kim,_ of all people, had insisted.

They hadn’t spoken much, Melanie and Ned’s aunt—the _seer,_ the part of her that’s still Ysabel, whispers, ancient and far too knowing. The morning after it had all come to an end, Meghan Marriner had kissed Melanie on both cheeks, warm as family, but family, as everyone knew, meant complicated things. Kim had only smiled and said hello, looking at her with a strange great sadness in her eyes, right before they’d all gone back down the mountain together and discovered that Melanie was _faster_ than she used to be.

Her colleagues and friends had been kind of weirded out by that. Greg and Steve and Ned had gotten accustomed to fitting their strides to hers, before, at least when they feared her divine wrath.

“Don’t joke about that,” Ned says, sharply, in December, when she’s been invited into the Marriners’ home for the holidays. And she remembers the boar; the sacrifices they’d made. The blood, and the long dark fall into nothing.

Moving, though.

She’d had to recalculate her steps to the Aix-en-Provence villa’s bathroom in the dark; had begun to outpace her colleagues on walks, things like that. Edward had suggested she might go running with Ned; he and Meghan didn’t seem to like letting Ned go places alone, even though he’d more than proved himself to all of them. To her.

Whichever _her_ that is.

It's not a reversal of fortune; there is no presence prodding at her from behind mirrored glass. When she’d been in Aix-en-Provence, she’d had flashes of memories that _cannot_ be her own. Glimpses into the histories she'd researched, like those images of hands holding up a photo from the past to match where they stand in the present, modern dress and cars juxtaposed with hats and horses. Impressions, overlays; nothing like Ned’s blood-soaked horror, fortunately. Just moments, the most fleeting sensations that _here_ Ysabel walked, and _here_ Ysabel waited for her beloved—whoever it had been—to come, and come again. And after another couple weeks of that, Melanie had been more than ready to get the hell out of France and go home to Montreal, where the old magic couldn’t reach.

But it had been hard. Her apartment had felt off-kilter; the same issue as in the villa happened with her own bathroom at night, leaving her stumbling around, hands outstretched, to make sure she wouldn’t bump into the vanity or the doorframe, a drunk sleepwalker zombie. In the kitchen, Melanie had tripped over her step-stool more often than not, no longer needing it to reach the second shelf of her cupboards.

And, helping Edward and Ned chop onions for stuffing—“You’re going to make me cry,” Ned says, sardonically—cooking is different. She can’t put her finger on what’s changed about _chopping an onion,_ but Meghan offers up the possibility that the extra three inches have given her more leverage.

Melanie mulls it over, and decides she likes that idea better than the persistent ill-fitting sensation. Ned finds it slightly alarming, the notion that she could be any _more_ of a mover than she already is, or had been. She thinks he might be alarmed because of what it means for him. His place in what’s yet to come, _if_ there’s something more to come. Melanie doesn’t _know_ , but she suspects, because Kim is there with Dave, flown in from England for the winter solstice, staying through the New Year.

There was no danger anymore, in lingering in France during the summer solstice, or so Kim had thought. She’d proposed this time instead, because there is _power_ in all of them together, at the darkest time of the year. Power, and joy, or, as Dave puts it, utterly sincere: “Mirth, merriment, and Marriners.”

“Are you planning something?” Ned had asked his aunt, suspiciously. “Do you think something—some _one_ —is coming?”

“We’ll be back in Montreal,” Melanie had said, too, frowning. “Beyond the reach of it.”

Kim had exchanged one of those sad looks with Dave, though that time there had been a kind of longing in it, too, and said, “I wouldn’t be so sure about the limits on that.”

But she’s smiling now, helping Dave and Melanie hang evergreen boughs. And mistletoe, which makes Ned blush very hard, and holly; and Edward and Ned put up a lovely nine-foot tree. And there’s a menorah, for the conjunction for Hanukkah and Christmas four days hence—and, Melanie hears Kim tell Meghan, for a friend.

And, of course, a huge great bonfire.

“We could just watch the Yule Log,” Ned says, turning in circles to keep himself warm. “On the TV?”

“I did some research on these traditions,” Melanie says, and hears him groan. She looks at Edward, standing with his wife and her sister, the firelight gilding their heads so that it’s nearly impossible to tell that Kim’s hair is so much the whiter. “Did you know that the Welsh name for the winter solstice could be either Alban Arthan, the ‘light of winter,’ _or_ Alban Arth _u_ an, the ‘light of Arthur?’”

Kim turns, very slowly, towards her, and Melanie has that frisson of insider-outsider tension again. As if she’s stepped too close to the lip of the garagai and the wind is tugging at her, or pushing her away. “Yes,” Kim says, is all, but she’s _looking_ at Melanie again.

Ned’s started throwing things into the flames, still very much a teenager. “Can I borrow your notes?” he asks.

“You don’t have anything due over the break,” Edward says, amused.

“Old habits,” Ned says.

Melanie’s looking back at Kim, puzzled at herself. She’d intended to share what she’d researched about First Nations winter solstice traditions—the New Fire ceremony in particular, since talk of druidic traditions was too close to it. But she’d opened her mouth and spoken a name, and there was no going back from that.

“Come on, there’s hot cocoa and cider,” Dave says, throwing a friendly arm around Ned’s shoulders. “Wazzup, wassail—”

Kim makes a _visible_ effort not to roll her eyes, but she laughs at her husband anyway, as Ned groans. Something unspoken passes between her and her sister, and Meghan nudges Edward to follow after, complaining too loudly that she can’t feel her hands, and that she _needs_ her hands, dammit, she’s a doctor!

Which leaves Kim and Melanie alone under the stars, the fire burning beside them. “Did you see something?” Melanie asks, right away. “You could’ve called. We could’ve—talked.”

“Spoken like a however-many-greats grandmother,” Kim says, lightly.

“A little less than kin,” Melanie says, deliberately misquoting.

“More than that, I think,” Kim replies. She’s peering at Melanie, her eyes shimmering with reflected light. “How has it been, coming back?”

“You know about the clothes,” Melanie says, wryly, and then she’s off, Kim’s clearly carefully chosen words sparking something in her. “Being by myself was— _is_ —harder than being in public, I think. People don’t bump into me as much. I don’t have an ENT’s view up their noses, either.” She smiles, a little. “It took some getting used to, even just around my apartment. Like I knew where everything _was_ still, just—”

“Everything seems smaller,” Kim says.

_“Literally,”_ Melanie says, with an amused huff of frosty breath. “Kim—honestly, _is_ there something I need to know about?”

“The story I know of is over and done, just as you and Ned ended Ysabel’s tale. But it echoes,” Kim says, softly.

Melanie blinks at her. “What does?”

Kim asks, “Do you believe they could have loved each other?”

A chill goes through Melanie that has nothing to do with the fact that it’s December in Canada. “Phelan and Cadell? Like—like Arthur and Lancelot, you mean? Like there was another way out for us—for them. Polyamory, if they’d had the word for it.”

Kim nods.

“I don’t think so,” Melanie says, slowly. “I think they only had eyes for her. It wasn’t like—Lancelot seeking out his king and accidentally falling for his queen, or _Arthur_ bringing him into it.” But she looks at Kim intently. “I’m no Guinevere.”

“No,” Kim breathes, her eyes brilliant and sorrowful, though there’s a kind of remembered happiness in her face. “But I wonder what she would make of _you.”_

“A queen’s maid,” Melanie jokes, suddenly sensing the flow of a deep, deep current in Kim’s words. Like if she dips her toe in and asks the utterly impossible question surfacing in her own heart, she’ll be pulled into events much larger than herself once again. “I’d probably have to cover up the green streak and play Gregorian chants on my cell phone.”

Then she plunges in anyway; she’s a _lever_ now, with Ysabel’s strength bolstering her own. Whatever Kim has to say, she can handle it. “Does your Guinevere know what a cell phone _is?”_

Kim laughs. “I think you wouldn’t have very good reception in Fionavar.”

Melanie draws a breath. “Is that where I’m going?” And, sly: “Is Ned going, too?”

“Oh, Melanie—” Kim laughs, again, putting a hand to her mouth.

And then Ned is calling to them over the lawn, threatening to leave them the dregs of the wassail, or worse, just the _nog_ , and they go in together, light shining out of the darkness at their backs.

**Author's Note:**

> If I were to try to map out my thought process on this fic, it would go something like this:  
> coralysendria's prompt (Alternatively, since it's Yuletide, what's Christmas like for Ned and Kim now? How does Kim celebrate, knowing what she does about other worlds and other deities?)->OOH SOLSTICE STUFF->druids-> _Alban Arthuan_ ->*RUNS STRAIGHT FOR HER COPY OF THE FIONAVAR TAPESTRY*->FIC!
> 
> Much thanks goes to M, for consulting on key aspects of the story. <3


End file.
